Back in November, I was browsing Amazon when I saw someone had a second-hand Wii Fit available for fifty quid. (For people without a Wii, the retail price for this is £79.99, but supply problems mean they're selling for more than that.)
Ring ring, ring ring…
Not that I expect anyone to notice, but our landline is currently not working for voice calls – callers just hear it ringing, but we don't and we don't have a dial tone either.
Curiously, the internet / TV over IP are still working.
Why yes, yesterday was the switchover day between BT and Tiscali for the line rental etc.
Erotica 2008
I've never paid to go to Erotica (or indeed its rival). On the occasions I've gone, it's been via a free ticket (ex-work were doing a bucket rattle a couple of years ago, for example) and still felt I deserved money back.
I got another one today, and it's done what I thought was impossible: got worse. There are fewer stalls – the aisles are noticeably wider, with several gaps in places once filled, and upstairs is particularly sparse – and only a handful are worth looking at. I went round the entire place in under 30 minutes. Go tomorrow and it'd cost you £30 to get in.
Argh. It could be so much better and so much less exploitative…
Now we know, oh now we know
When I was one of the people running the London Bisexual Group, so oooh fifteen or so years ago, they'd be forty or so people turn up each week including five to ten new people.
One week, someone came back for their second time and was most miffed that I couldn't remember his name from the previous week. So miffed in fact that they declined – no, 'refused' would be a better word – to remind me, and continued to do so ever afterwards. I soon stopped bothering to ask.
Today, I saw them again, with someone rather more sensible and now I know.
Not that I'm likely to remember, mind.
Because Nicole Kidman's hair is clearly more important than people's safety
A friend was supposed to be on Five News this lunchtime, talking about the stupid proposals to criminalise – with strict liability! – buying sexual services from people 'controlled' (that doesn't mean coerced: if you chose to work for an agency and get told where a client is and you go there, or when your shift is, that's control) by others or who were 'trafficked' (even if they wanted to come here knowing exactly what work they were going to do).
But apparently Nicole Kidman not dyeing some grey hairs is a more important story, and there was only a few seconds on this one, complete with some classic 'women on street corners at night' shots…
Last month, I took JA to the doctor's for her second MMR jab
We get into the nurse's room, and I get what I can only described as harangued about why she should have had it earlier in her life, why it was so important, why people who didn't have it were stupid etc. Read more
I feel like Simon Callow's in my new PC
I remembered this story today.
Simon was Mozart in the original production of Amadeus at the National Theatre. When Milos Forman was making the film, he met with Simon and said he 'obviously' couldn't cast him in the part (too uncommercial or something) but surely I can find you a part…?
Ah yes, Emanuel Schikaneder, who wrote the words for The Magic Flute as well as producing the first production – of course, who else?
Anyway, come the days of filming and Milos tells Simon he wants no acting! "Be natural!" he says, dozens of times when shooting the tiny section he's in the film. "H" says Simon under his breath each time, knowing that is what most of Europe call the note we call B (their B is our Bb).
Why remember this today?
Because the sodding Windows installer decided that the compact flash reader would be drive C. Clearly the two DVD drives would be D and E. Naturally, the other memory card readers are F and G.
So that leaves the drive the Windows system is on as H.
H?!?
Memory is telling me the only way to change this is to go through the installation process again (possibly disconnecting the memory card reader first!) but is there a way to ensure it assigns letters how I want them, rather than semi-randomly?
Amazon go down the river
Amazon.co.uk used to have a promise that if you bought something from them and the price dropped within the next 30 days, they'd refund the difference.
If you asked them.
And they didn't make a big fuss about pointing this out to you – the details were buried quite deep in the help pages.
But it is an excellent idea and it was a reason for me to use them.
As I've just seen something I bought a few days ago drop by £9.90, I looked for the details on the site. Couldn't find them. I remembered that they weren't exactly prominent, so I sent off an email.
Apparently, this promise was dropped on the 1st September this year.
Now, they're going to give me the refund (thank you Amazon) but can anyone find anything about this promise going? Their terms and conditions reckon they were last changed in 2007, for example.
I can't find anything about this on the main Amazon.com site either…
Just call me Oscar
There's a mailing list which I think only one of you is on, where someone has asked – in all seriousness – "Does poverty really limit choices?"
My response:
"Let them eat cake" you mean?
I suspect I saw the best (London) play this year in February
.. but in the past week I've seen what will surely end up as 'silliest' and 'best musical'.
Spyski is Peepolykus being very, very silly as usual, this time with a spy story interfering with a production of The Importance of Being Ernest. The Times' review is spot on – not all of it works, but what does is fab. Two throw-away highlights for me are what they do with the gun after an accident and the train sound effects.
Eurobeat is a better Eurovision Song Contest than the original will ever be. Amazingly, I can't spot a reference to seeing it in any of the LJs of people I know love Eurovision. If that's you, or you just like pop spoofs, you need to see this. Sit down about ten minutes early to see the 'instructions'. If you have seen it – who won? My favourite (the 'Polish' entry with men singing about coming together and miming fisting) was narrowly beaten by the Russians. Voting tip: listen to the cheers for the various countries at the start, then – unless you want to vote for it – pick the one with fewest other people 'from' there to maximise the effect of your vote.
Both close on the 1st November. Spyski is available for £12.50 via lastminute.com, while Eurobeat is always available at the half-price booth in Leicester Square. In fact, given that there was no-one in the upper two levels for Eurobeat last night, I suspect anyone with a ticket there gets moved to the stalls, so if the theatre is selling those tickets, that may be even cheaper.